“My dad never finished high school,” Huckabee said. “He was a fireman, and on his days off, he worked in a generator shop. The work of the day was always on his hands. The only soap we had in the house was Lava. I was in college before I found out it’s not supposed to hurt when you take a shower.”

A good line. And Huckabee, a former Arkansas governor, used those lines to reel in a number of reporters — for a while anyway. Frank Rich, one of the most astute political analysts in the country, wrote a column for The New York Times in February 2007, comparing Huckabee with Barack Obama.

“Both men have a history of speaking across party and racial lines,” Rich wrote. “Both men possess that rarest of commodities in American public life: wit. Most important, both men aspire (not always successfully) to avoid the hyper-partisanship of the Clinton-Bush era.”

Times change. And Mike Huckabee has changed with them.

He senses his party doesn’t want sweet-talkin’ guys. This time around, he believes the Republican Party wants guys who will eat nails and spit out tacks.

In 2011, Huckabee said of Barack Obama, “his perspective as growing up in Kenya with a Kenyan father and grandfather, their view of the Mau Mau Revolution in Kenya, is very different than ours because he probably grew up hearing that the British were a bunch of imperialists who persecuted his grandfather.”

Barack Obama did not grow up in Kenya, of course. He was born in Hawaii and grew up there, spending four years in Indonesia.

Just one of those little details that escaped Huckabee.

One of the things that people remember about Huckabee — if they remember anything at all — is that he used to weigh 300 pounds. He lost 100 pounds and wrote a book about it titled “Quit Digging Your Grave with a Knife and Fork.”

But in February 2011, Karen Tumulty of The Washington Post observed: “Huckabee was tucking into a breakfast of eggs and butter-slathered pancakes at a trendy New York hotel overlooking Times Square. His much-discussed diet … is apparently on hiatus.”

It is. When Huckabee announced for president on Tuesday, he looked like a beach ball in a suit. An angry beach ball in a suit.

“Washington is more dysfunctional than ever and has become so beholden to the donor class who fills the campaign coffers!” Huckabee said.

He did not mention, however, a New York Times story from last month that revealed that a well-known Iowa political operative had formed a Huckabee super PAC “with the ability to raise unlimited donations to support the former Arkansas governor.”

Want to know how he feels about health care? Not good, that’s how he feels. “How can anyone ever trust government again if they steal from us and lie to us?” Huckabee says. “It didn’t help when Congress took $700 billion out of Medicare to pay for Obamacare!”

Foreign affairs? “When I hear the current president say he wants Christians to get off their high horse so we can make nice with radical jihadists, I wonder if he could watch a western from the ’50s and be able to figure out who the good guys and bad guys are!” Huckabee says.

“As president, I promise you that we will no longer merely try to contain jihadism; we will conquer it! We will deal with jihadis just as we would deal with deadly snakes.”

Huckabee believes that “we have witnessed the slaughter of over 55 million babies in the name of choice” in this country and are now “threatening the foundation of religious liberty by criminalizing Christianity in demanding that we abandon biblical principles of natural marriage.”

Government is not the solution, Huckabee says. It is the problem. “Government in Washington is dysfunctional because it’s become the roach motel: People go in, but they never come out.”

Having grown rich off his TV show, appearances and books, Huckabee says he is willing to give it all up, just to live in public housing at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

“I’ve walked away from my own income to do this,” he says, “so I’m not asking you for a sacrifice I’m not willing to make.”

And take this, Hillary Clinton. “I don’t have a global foundation or a taxpayer-funded paycheck to live off of!” Huckabee says.

And take this, Jeb Bush. “I don’t come from a family dynasty, but a working family,” Huckabee says. “I grew up blue collar and not blue blood!” Last time Huckabee ran, being a sweetie didn’t get him the nomination.